Tag Archives: pathogens

This past January I wanted to see what would happen to my gut flora if I adopted a hunter-gatherer diet for a week – eating the plants, animals and drinking the same water as the Hadza hunter-gatherers of east Africa

I was recently invited to put together a series of slides – or webinar – for a national supermarket chain on things their customers could do to improve the health of their gut microbiome. Once I got past the obvious

A guest post by Moises Velasquez-Manoff. Coronado Biosciences, a company seeking FDA approval for a type of medicalized parasite, recently announced the beginning of a very interesting trial on Type 1 diabetes. Coronado is running a number of studies

In the summer of 2008, a 26-year-old man from Shanxi Province walked into a lab at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and 23 weeks later walked out 113 pounds lighter. He had not participated in a clinical trial of some new

I can remember where I was and what I was doing when it happened. I was sitting in my usual spot at Sound Café in the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans sipping coffee on a Sunday morning. It was mid-August,

In the 50 years since the book “Silent Spring” sounded the alarm on humankind’s poisoning of the biosphere with synthetic pesticides like DDT, the grass roots environmental movement has tackled issues ranging from clean air and water, animal rights and

AS ANY reader of this blog knows, the human body is a mash up of human and microbial cells – with the microbial cells outnumbering our own 10 to 1. When you also consider the fact the human genome (our

Sitting on the floor of a traditional Himba hut in northern Namibia this past summer, I found myself staring at a peculiar hand-sized hole located about halfway up the curved wall thinking to myself, “what could be the purpose of

Every person on earth has two genomes. The genome we inherit from mom and dad is the one we are most familiar, and more or less stuck with for life. Our second genome, the one we initially acquire from mom

Earlier this year (in 2012), U.S. News & World Report reported its second annual list of the Best Diets, as ranked by a panel of “22 nationally recognized experts in diet, nutrition, obesity, food psychology, diabetes, and heart disease.” The

PACKED INTO four-wheel drive vehicles, ten middle-aged men and women traveled nearly two days on bumpy dirt roads and trails to reach a remote location, deep in the middle of nowhere. For seven weeks they would live off the land

ACCORDING to the World Health Organization, key causes of hunger are natural disasters, conflict, poverty, poor agricultural infrastructure and over-exploitation of the environment. I would add to that list spending a week in the high desert of Arizona with

IN EARLY 2004, a team of researchers spent nearly five months in a lowland subtropical forest in Bolivia following spider monkeys – an arboreal primate that primarily dines on ripe fruit and leaves. From dawn to dusk, the researchers recorded